Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

L ANGUAGES
Central Asia. A most interesting case exemplifying the
various possibilities is Central Asia, where various
forms of Buddhism coexisted during the second half
of the first millennium. First, there were some ethnic
groups, notably speakers of the two dialects of Tocharian
(the easternmost form of western Indo-European),
of the two Saka dialects, Tumshuq and Khotanese
(Middle Iranian), and of Uigur (a Turkish language),
who continued to use Sanskrit as their “church” language,
but also translated scriptures into their vernacular
and composed their own Buddhists texts. That
these ethnic groups transmitted scriptures in Sanskrit
is proven by the existence of a considerable number of
bilingual manuscripts and texts, manuscripts where
glosses in one of the local languages are added to a Sanskrit
text between the lines, as well as texts, at least in
the case of the Tocharians and Uigurs, where the Sanskrit
original and the vernacular translation alternate
word by word or sentence by sentence in the same line.
Second, there were the Chinese and the Tibetans, both
of whom translated Buddhist literature into their own
languages from the very beginning of missionary activity
in their countries. Finally, there is the specific
case of the Sogdians, speakers of another Middle Iranian
language, whose merchants must have been instrumental
in spreading Indian Buddhism and its
literature from the Kushan empire to China. When
they started in the second half of the first millennium
to translate Buddhist texts into Sogdian, they did so
from Chinese translations of Indian originals. All this
can be gleaned from Central Asian manuscript finds,
and specifically from the walled-up library in DUN-
HUANG, where texts in all these different languages
were found side by side.
According to Jan Nattier no translation of an Indian
Buddhist text into a vernacular is found west of Kashgar,
the westernmost town in the Tarim basin. So far,
recent manuscript finds in Afghanistan confirm her
view, since nearly all the texts are written in Indian languages.
There is only one exception—a Buddhist text in
Bactrian, yet another Middle Iranian language, but at
present it is not clear whether it is a translation or a ritual
text written in the vernacular for a specific purpose.
China and East Asia. As soon as Buddhism reached
China it proved necessary to translate its texts into Chinese.
One reason for this must have been the extreme
grammatical and phonetic differences between Indian
languages and Chinese; another reason was the sheer
foreignness of Buddhism to the Chinese, whose highly
sophisticated and literary culture was distinguished by
rather different value systems and aesthetic perceptions.
Translation techniques went through various
models and periods, starting with the second-century
translator AN SHIGAO, who made extensive use of the
vocabulary and other features of the spoken language.
This tendency to incorporate vernacular elements was
followed by a period that was characterized by an attempt
to employ Daoist vocabulary to express Buddhist
terms and ideas, and to write in a more literary
mode. A new standard was set during the fifth century
when the famous translator KUMARAJIVA (350–409/
413) introduced the translation bureau, a team of Chinese
and foreign specialists who, usually under state
patronage, jointly took care of the various steps involved
in the translation process. Similar institutions
were set up several times in the history of Central and
East Asian Buddhism—for example, in Tibet during
its imperial age, and later in Central Asia and China
for the translations of the Tangut, Mongol, and
Manchu versions of the tripitaka.
As Chinese culture became paradigmatic throughout
East Asia, Buddhism went along with it. In its
Sinitic form, Buddhism spread to Korea, Japan, and
Vietnam, and literary Chinese became the “church”
language of Buddhist literature throughout East Asia.
In Central Asia, as mentioned above, Chinese translations
served as the basis for all the translations into
Sogdian, but also for many into Uigur and some into
Tibetan. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries,
a considerable number of translations—first of
Chinese, then also of Tibetan translations of Buddhist
texts—were further translated into Tangut or Xixia,
another Sino-Tibetan language used in the Tangut
empire northwest of China, before its destruction by
Genghis Khan.
Tibet and Mongolia. Buddhism reached Tibet
around the seventh century. From the very beginning,
apparently, texts were translated into the vernacular,
but they did not encounter an existing literary heritage
as they had in China; indeed the traditional sources inform
us that the Tibetan script was created specifically
to translate Buddhist materials. A few of the early
translations are preserved. Their grammar is often
awkward, if not contrary to Tibetan usage, because of
their attempt to reproduce the word order of the Indian
original, and different Tibetan words are employed
to express the same Buddhist term. Another
difference from the situation in China concerned the
role of Buddhism in Tibet: It appears that from the beginning
Buddhism served domestic political purposes
454 E NCYCLOPEDIA OF B UDDHISM